Anonymous recently hacked a NATO system and has made off with a gigabyte of data.
UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU TOUCH THIS CONTENT
Due to the laws on the books it is more hazardous to handle this stuff than it was for Wikileaks to take what Bradley Manning offered them.
A bit of info and some strong prohibitions exist on the other side of the inscrutable squiggle of additional content.
Here is as good an article as any on the actual intrusion on GeekTech . See the image in there of a single page of NATO Restricted data? You guys know how much I like having a few good illustrations in my diary, right?
I will not even take that single image and add it to my Flickr. That’s how serious this is.
I got a call earlier today from someone in the business. It went something like this.
“Have you been involved in any way with LulzSec or Anonymous in the context of this NATO stuff?”
“No.”
“Have you even been passively observing what they did?”
”No.”
”Are any of your contacts involved?”
”Not to my knowledge.”
“Not even in passive observation?”
”No.”
“You need to notify them that they absolutely can not touch that stuff, not as a torrent, not ever. It’s treated differently than intrusion, having it even if broadly distributed is a crime that will lead to prison time. Warn all of them. Do it now.”
This guy knows what he is talking about. He never calls me during work hours. He never asks me about any of my contacts or what they are doing. He never tells me to do anything, our relationship has always been him posing questions, me answering, and him telling stories about things he has seen in his career. I’m a little slow, but I eventually I catch on to the lesson of the day.
We talked a little more once the initial warning was given. There are 28 member nations in NATO and some close allies will get involved, too. We’re talking KGB trained leadership in Romanian, Bulgary, and Hungary. They’ll probably let Mossad in on the fun. This is the electronic equivalent of 9/11 for NATO’s infosec people and they will respond. If there was a nation state guiding the people who did this there is the possibility of a kinetic response.
Let me translate that into English:
If the wrong people had a hand in this the following scene may well play out as part of the NATO response.
So … I am fierce, fearless, my black hat has more than one bullet crease in it from my misspent youth, I’m now a creaky old man who does some funny security stuff, and I swear I’m doing nothing but playing Mafia Wars until this business passes.